RESEARCH INTERESTS

History of science and the body, human variation, quantification, history of colonialism and empire, modern European history, critical theory 

BIOGRAPHY

Iris Clever is a postdoctoral fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and an iSchool Research Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her BA and MA in History from Utrecht University and her PhD in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from UCLA. Her work explores how humans become embedded in technologies and how we use technologies to understand human identity. She is particularly interested in how humans become quantified in the modern world and how historical legacies of human measurement live on in present-day science, medicine, and society. Her first book project, The Afterlives of Skulls, is under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press. The book makes visible how measuring skulls for the purpose of studying human variation, often assumed to be an outdated medical-scientific practice, in fact remained at the forefront of science and technology in the twentieth century. It reveals how historical skull collections, cranial datasets, and statistical tools shape contemporary scientific and social understandings of human variation. 

PUBLICATIONS

“Old Bones in New Databases: Historical Insights into Human Variation, Statistics, and Ancestry Estimation in Anthropology” (with Lisette Jong, forthcoming with American Anthropologist in September 2025)

“The Origins of Forensic Anthropology in the United States,” Forensic Anthropology 6: 192-205 (with Nicholas Passalacqua, 2024). https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2023.0011

 “Biometry Against Fascism: Geoffrey Morant and Human Variation in Twentieth-Century Physical Anthropology,” Isis 114: 25-49 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1086/723686

“Miriam Tildesley and the Anthropological Politics of Standardizing Measurements,” in: I. Clever, J. Hyun, and E. Burton (eds.), Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in Human Populations Studies, special issue in Perspectives on Science 30: 13-47. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00401

“Introduction: People in Motion,” Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in Human Populations Studies, special issue in Perspectives on Science 30: 1-12 (with Jaehwan Hyun and Elise Burton, 2022) https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_e_00400

“Beyond Cultural History? The Material Turn and Body History,” Humanities 3: 546-566 (with Willemijn Ruberg, 2014) https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040546